How many fun ideas are there?

Tonight I was eating with my daughter and telling her about an article I had read, about what an airline did to stop people from complaining about a long wait for luggage (if you like to read this kind of "why your brain is totally screwed up" article, you already know the answer didn't have anything to do with shortening the wait).

I do like reading this kind of thing, and Faith enjoyed hearing about it. But I read stuff every day, and I like to be entertained every day. Does someone, somewhere, discover something both useful and entertaining about human behavior every day? Somehow, I don't think so.

But we still demand it. So is it any wonder that people like Jonah Lehrer, having to shovel intellectual tidbits into the maw of the great beast on a regular basis, might use neutral filler or past-expiration scraps to fill out a shovel load now and then? Can he really say "sorry, got nothing today, go read Proust"? It's pretty much the same reason the talking heads on TV keep talking even if they have to repeat what they just said. If they tell us to go get some coffee and come back in half an hour when something might actually be happening, we might not come back.

There are certainly some superhumans out there, who seem to generate endless interesting content. But that is not most of us. And even those people could probably stand to shut up once in a while. But as long as no one is allowed to shut up, ever, we'll see more and more intelligent, productive people self-destructing as they try to keep up the unrelenting pace.

You can tell I'm not one of them.

The war on the 50s

As I've mentioned before, PSAs about child abuse, substance abuse, spousal abuse, etc. tend to be lame and/or creepy, because there is no way of measuring effectiveness, there is free money from some charity or agency, and young designers like to do them to build their portfolios.

Here (via copyranter) is a PSA about child abuse that at first (in the "clever" twist invented by the Energizer bunny) seems to be about learning how to make model rockets. Watch it, then think about what it's real message is.

In his post, copyranter says the film makers found a real offender in a real correctional facility for this.

What does it teach? That you should never let your kids do anything anywhere with anyone, because the world is a disgusting and dangerous place? Well, pretty much. Leave your kids with their Playstations in the family room, for heaven's sake. Does it teach you anything useful?  I don't think so.

Because who the hell builds model rockets anymore?

To find something that seems innocent and useful that a kid might be doing, they had to reach back into the dark Heinleinian past. I suppose you could do it with a mountain-biking club, or something like that, but nothing comes quickly to my mind that has the same virtuous resonance as the rocketry thing. Plus 50s bashing is always popular. After all, we all know that the 50s were actually a dark tormented time that just hid its basic sickness successfully. The more innocent something seems, the greater danger hides beneath it.

This is not to assert that there is no danger out there. Recent church and school scandals show that there is.

But I don't think going after obsolete hobbies is the best way to protect our children.

On buying books at full price

Like anyone else, I get seduced by getting books at a discount off cover price, whether at Amazon, or with coupons, or at special sales. It's nice to save money.

There are two problems with this. One, how much money am I saving?  Given that I sometimes like to go out and get a drink at a local bar like the Saloon or Casablanca, which runs over $10. And sometimes I have more than one. It's not that saving money on books is thus irrelevant, or that I drink way more than I read (really!), but it seems proportionally less important.

And when books are on sale, I am often tempted to buy them. I mean, I buy books I otherwise wouldn't, because the price is lower. Yes, I know that's dumb. I do it anyway.

So I have books I sell to used bookstores, and books I leave on my shelves for some future date when I read them. Hello, three volumes of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. That vicious little court intriguer sounds just up my alley, from what I've read, but I can't say when I will finish them.

So, a couple of days ago, when I read a David Frum review of a new book by one of my favorite history writers, Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, I went out and bought it at my local bookstore, Porter Square Books. At full price. Who's going to tell me where my consumer surplus lies? Tonight I'll drink at home.

And I'll report on the book when I'm done. So far, it's great fun.

Why is one tiny hand so funny?

I have no idea why I find the tumblr One Tiny Hand so fascinating, and hilarious. But I do.

And I'm not even sure what a tumblr is, or how it works, and will certainly never create one.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should: creepymouth commercials

There seems to have been some minor technical barrier surmounted in animation, and now you can stick realistic-looking moving mouths wherever you want to in an ad.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no good use for realistic-looking mouths anywhere but on someone who already has a completely functional mouth, in a pretty good spot. So whenever the technology comes up, it is almost miraculously creepy.

Below, a couple of students from Uncanny Valley High, class of 2012:

"Another one of those green beers, Scarecrow?" I stay home on St. Patrick's Day, and now I know why.

Holy ....! PSAs tend to attract a bad element--recent grads with more technical capabilities than sense, a feeling that they don't need to pay attention to consequences because they are doing something socially good, and access to public-service money that needs to get spent so that a box gets checked on some bureaucrat's annual plan. This one is particularly egregious. (via Copyranter, who has just moved to Buzzfeed.  Actually, I bet the three-mouthed beast is from Copyranter too, but I was too traumatized to remember where I saw it). I'm sure newly breastfeeding moms have exactly this nightmare.

When something can be done, it will be done, but that doesn't mean it should be done.

The Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy

I should start this post with my usual boilerplate disclaimer when discussing environmental issues: I live in Cambridge, I ride my bike everywhere, I am concerned about global warming, but more concerned about issues to do with water (both drinking, and the kind that is losing all of its fish).

But I find most of the things people like to propose as ways of solving our problems, like high-speed trains, wind generators, and electric cars, are kind of...silly. There is no way a dollar spent on any of those things generates anything like a dollar's worth of value. They have a vaguely cargo cultish feel to them: useless rituals performed by people who do not understand the real means of production. Wind towers are really just fancy statues of John Frum. These things will bring us Green Cargo.

Well, I started to tell you about how, really, I was one of the great and the good, and now I've gotten all Copenhagen Consensus on you, which just demonstrates my unreliability. You now suspect I am in the pocket of the Heartland Institute.

So, with that preparation, via Knowledge Problem, a notice that the U.K. magazine Spectator has announced the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy: a  £8500 prize for the best 1,000 to 2,000 word essay the makes

the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.

Over $13,000 by today's exchange rate. That's midlist novel advance-level money!

BTW, now you know why midlist authors are pathetic.

I like Matt Ridley's science journalism, and it's a challenge worth taking up. Entries close June 30, 2012.

A great ad that clarifies why newspapers are dying

The ad Copyranter described as "the best ad of the year, so far":

It's totally fun, but as an ad for the Grauniad, or any news entity, it seems a bit off kilter. You don't actually see any reporting or investigation, though I suppose the guy in his bathrobe could be a reporter.  All you see is a mass of instant opinion, ending with a Greek-style "you made us borrow too much money" riot that seems to justify murdering mortgage holders.

As a Madisonian nightmare of an overconnected populace run amok, it's dead on.

An idea even sillier than green roofs on buildings

Green roofs on buses. (via Human Transit)

I have no real technical analysis to add to John Metcalfe's "make the rubble bounce" takedown: weight, watering, safety....

But the fact that any number of media outlets have picked up this notion, roughly similar in realism to the doodles of car-top lasers or backyard rocket launchers found in the notebooks of bored kids in class across our great land, says something.

One thing it says is "reporters are lazy", which you know, because you are lazy, and you would be even if you were a reporter.

The other thing it says is "we're doomed".

There are no good answers out there. We face serious, genuine environmental problems, and we have no idea of what to do about them. Reporters jump on things like planting sedum on top of buses because there really isn't anything else to put in their stories.

Dealing with meetings

Most people--most people with jobs, that is--say they hate meetings. The waste of time, the boredom, etc.

They are lying. Almost every employed person secretly likes meetings. Why? Because, bar the odd one where you have to do some tedious presentation or other, you don't have to work at a meeting. And, since you have to be at work all day, an hour or two sitting on a conference room is a chance to relax. All you really need to do is look alert. And make intelligent-seeming comments that have no work consequence for you.

Imagine that. All you need to do is sound smart. It's a great deal. People say they don't like them because if they admit they do, they fear someone will do something about it. Like cancel the meeting. Which just adds another hour of sitting in your cube staring at a screen.

When you're a freelancer, it's different. They pay you for product, but when you aren't working, it's entirely your business. Meeting filler is less valuable, because the alternative is not the grim cube, but the couch, or leaving the house altogether, or working on some other project. I have several regular meetings during the week with my main client, and they are nowhere near entertaining. Not terrible, just not something I would pick if it weren't part of the job. They just move me an hour closer to whatever deadline I have without allowing me to get anything actually done on what I'm supposed to deliver. They are a source of stress.

I do try. The meetings where they make me use a webcam are complete loss, plus I have to put on a nice shirt, adjust the lighting, and not slouch. But even the other ones, where I can put the Mute button on and type or something, I feel obliged to pay attention to what people are saying. It's just distracting. And sometimes they mix real content in with the announcements about events I won't be able to attend, staffing changes of no possible relevance to me, and bonus programs I don't qualify for. It's a cruel trick.

So, you, office worker: stop complaining about your meetings. They are a relatively painless way to abrade your day.

We live in Newt Gingrich's alternate universe

There are certain figures that genre writers like to use as defining specific eras.  If you go to early-to-mid eighteenth century America, no matter where you go, you run into Benjamin Franklin. Straining at the limits of biography, Neal Stephenson bootlegs an extremely young Ben Franklin into Quicksliver, and Jim Morrow puts an only slightly older one into The Last Witchfinder. Similarly, Mark Twain puffs a cigar and comments mordantly in almost any version of the Gilded Age you can imagine, Theodore Roosevelt yells "Bully!" in alternate worlds with steam-powered land dreadnoughts and Confederate empires, and Winston Churchill nobly faces down invading German armies even in worlds where history varied widely from our own. No amount of historical change can seem to get rid of these guys.

I am sure Newt Gingrich sees himself as a similar linking figure, looming darkly in a variety of divergent histories. Often he is scorned and disregarded, which doesn't make him any the less penetrating and right. But now, in our universe.... The muffin and the moment have met.

Gingrich writes and reads science fiction. I am sure that he consciously thinks this. This is the right universe, he thinks, for his improbable ascent. This is the line of history that is the true one. There are lesser lines where he goes down to defeat. They are low-probability lines, inhabited by shadows.

I don't think he'd ever blurt this out, in debate or on the stump. He has learned some control over the years. It would make him seem...crazy. But look into his eyes. He doesn't really believe that you exist. You're just a shadow appearing in a single universe. But he is a reality in all of them. Believe it.

Who's willing to pay for increased density?

In an interesting post, Upzoning Manhattan, Matthew Yglesias asks, "Should Manhattan get even denser?" and answers "Yes".  Cities are green, and denser cities are greener.

Despite the fact that the demand for increased density is ever-present in economically successful cities, people who already live there usually resist. This is certainly true here in Cambridge. As I've mentioned before, there is a struggle in my neighborhood to decrease the density of residential units being built on what was once a commercial greenhouse and a heating oil distributor.  People are quite angry about the negative externalities of having more people in their neighborhood (traffic, mostly).

Pretty much everyone who lives here does so because of the density, which results in easy access to food, entertainment, specialty stores, and interesting neighbors. Those additional neighbors will help support more of all of these things. And if we don't provide places for new people to live, housing prices here will continue to rise, and they will move elsewhere, eventually to some other part of the country. We lose not only liveliness, but economic growth and political influence.

Current neighbors have a vote, potential neighbors don't. And let's not get into that annoying issue of private property, and the pesky rights that go along with it. The solution is always to rezone so that people who bought the property hoping to develop it under the old zoning no longer are able to do so. Eventually, no building will occur, and Cambridge will become a retirement community with universities and biotech firms in it. I don't see that as a viable future.

Comparative effectiveness: what the big money should be funding

• Do aid programs work? If so, which ones are the most effective?
• Does education increase value? By how much? Which methods work best? For whom?
• Does this or that medical treatment actually benefit the patient? Is there an easier, cheaper method that's just as effective? What routine practices would reduce death or morbidity rates?
• Does increasing density benefit the economic life of cities? What mix of density and sprawl gives maximum freedom and happiness to the population?
• Which practices most effectively preserve biodiversity, or decrease atmospheric carbon, or preserve scarce resources?

These are all difficult questions. They are hard to answer because there are so many vested interests and existing practices, and the benefits aren't clear cut. There is a huge amount of noise in each of these systems. And testing comparative effectiveness is extremely expensive and time-consuming.

This is where the big charitable foundations, like the Gates Foundation, should be putting their money. And I mean, all of it. There is huge potential value in improving all of these systems. Only large amounts of disinterested money, with no stake in the outcomes, can effectively fund studies that will provide credible, reliable results.

But, oddly, many of these foundations continue to fund actual programs. Educational programs. Aid programs. Urban development programs. Even though no one really knows which of them works, and what the most effective procedures are.

Even these guys want to seem to be doing something. Just learning what works seems so removed from human affairs, so academic. But it isn't. Without such studies, we are wasting our time and money.

Part of it, of course, is that everyone is afraid of the answers. Which treasured programs, practices, and beliefs actually don't do anything, or are actually harmful? A lot of vested interests stand to be disrupted.

And no big foundation is in the disruption business. They are in the cultural assumption validation business. No one goes to a fancy charity ball to celebrate proving that the past five decades of aid to some country's poor has been entirely wasted.

Still, I want to see someone do it. In fact, that's a charity I would donate to.

The plight of the payer

Confirmation bias is the defining cognitive error of physicians.  Physicians want to help you. Therefore, by definition, whatever they do to you must be helping you. Plus, you are demanding, and if they actually do manage to say "well, actually, there is nothing we can really do about that", you get mad and search around for someone who will finally do something. Finally, they get paid more if they do something than if they don't. They will tell you that that has no effect on their decisions, but they are, of course, wrong.

Hence my essential healthcare cost equation:

Bias-to-action, income-requiring physicians + patients demanding that someone do something = excess spending on healthcare

(Please note:  I don't mean to imply that physicians are not actually performing useful services, or that patients are hypochondriacs.  I'm just pointing out a tendency)

And who has to do that excess spending? Health insurers. And by necessity...you, the premium payer.

So if insurers discover that some medical procedure really, genuinely doesn't do anything useful, can they stop paying physicians to do it?

Consider the dubious practice of vertebroplasty, where someone injects cement into a vertebra to alleviate the pain of vertebral compression fractures. Back pain is awful and debilitating, and sufferers will go to almost any lengths to find something that works. Doctors who provide vertebroplasty are sure that it works.

An interesting article in Health Affairs, "Can Coverage Be Rescinded When Negative Trial Results Threaten A Popular Procedure? The Ongoing Saga Of Vertebroplasty" (HT: The Incidental Economist) covers this issue in detail. (The article was ungated when I looked at it, but seems to be gated now.  Pressure from vertebroplasty providers? In any case, unfortunate: it's a good article.)

There is no good clinical trial that shows that it works.  Insurers started covering the procedure here and there, and as a result are stuck:

 ...after insurers had covered vertebroplasty for so long, however, they feared that any attempt to change their “yes” to a “no” would be publicly perceived as cutting off access to beneficial care.

Because insurance covered the procedure, that very coverage had created a landscape of providers, manufacturers, and patients with a vested interest in continuing the status quo.

Because the procedure is covered, it is hard to recruit for a clinical trial by offering access to a new procedure. Two studies were done comparing the results of a vertebroplasty against a sham surgery, both indicating that the procedure, as you might expect, does nothing. There is a lot of "need to act" and money (and ego) involved now, so those who do these procedures are pushing back hard:

Because vertebroplasty is a technique requiring manual skill, the clinicians who perform the procedure often believe that the results of any related study will be driven by the training and expertise of the study practitioners.

It would be nice if "does the procedure do anything?" was the standard of coverage, but this is the real world here:

The vertebroplasty trials illuminated a divide between the highest-quality scientific evidence available and the dominant opinion in the clinical community about the benefits of the procedure. Payers reported that when making policy, they must strive to take both into account.

There is no good solution to this conundrum. I'm sure it happens in single-payer systems too. At the edges of provable benefits, patients become big babies and doctors turn into self-deluding egomaniacs. That's the rock-solid foundation under every healthcare system.

The Red Queen's race of innovation

Randall Parker of the ever-interesting Futurepundit had a post earlier this week pointing out that we need to continue to innovate just to maintain our current standard of living. This is a corollary to Tyler Cowen's notion of the Great Stagnation.

The Industrial Revolution happened when a relatively small group of people in northwestern Europe figured out how to unlock the energy in black sunlight, coal, and use it to move heavy things around. Water first, then other stuff, then people. Once they had it around, the energy proved useful for other things, and let them grab a lot of minerals and reform them in useful ways. The intellectual system that resulted proved useful for finding and using yet other hiding-in-plain-sight resources, like oil, atmospheric nitrogen, underground water, previously unaccessible soils, deepwater fish. Each time they climbed over a new lip, there was a big pool of resources to be used.

We had a good run. Now every one of those resources is getting more expensive in terms of energy and effort. Those big pools are gone. If the price of these resources goes up in absolute terms, in energy and time, then we will have to use less. We need to be constantly figuring out ways to get and use them more efficiently in order to have water, food, warmth, light, and entertainment. Innovations need to come regularly just to keep us as comfortable as we are now.

It may well be that our dramatic advances in information manipulation have somewhat misled us on how obdurate physical reality is. Our airy towers get higher and more beautiful. Maintaining the foundations is a constant effort. Do we understand how much effort that really is?

Properly used, of course, it is just that information that will enable us to understand that, and do something about it. Or it might just let us clearly perceive the looming disaster, while enabling an incredible amount of futile squabbling about whose fault it is.

The 2008 financial meltdown and the current pathetic Eurozone refusal to recognize that a snappy new pair of jeans doesn't really do anything about the gangrene in your leg will look like minor intellectual errors in comparison to the history of that collapse.

Newt Gingrich: a science fiction writer's idea of a politician

What, you need an actual post to go along with the title?

I guess, now that we are in the future, we need one of those technocratic visionary leaders the future was always going to ruled by.

Science fiction writers don't create futures you want to live in. They create futures that are fun to read about. This one is turning out to be neither.

Invisible progress: surgical hemostats

I too sometimes go for the "where's my jetpack?", Great Stagnation negativity about technological progress over the past few decades.

But progress is steady, and to a large extent invisible. I recently wrote a press release for a client about surgical hemostats, internal tissue sealants, and adhesion barriers.  This is a whole range of materials the control internal blood flow and connect up tissues, largely during surgery. There is intense competition, and new forms of these are constantly being developed. If you go into surgery, one of these is probably used during the procedure. But who outside of a surgical suite has ever heard of the things?

And, yes, I presume a new combination thrombin/gelatin surgical hemostat (thrombin for the clotting, gelatin as a physical blood barrier) is more expensive than its predecessor.  Surgeries have certainly been performed successfully without it. But each small advance adds up. I bet a surgeon in 2011, if he or she had to perform a surgery in 1991, would be startled by how many taken-for-granted little advances there have been in those two decades, and how retrospectively difficult and dangerous surgery back in that dark age really was.  Ditto for someone in 2031 coming back to now.

Dull for a science fiction writer to fit compellingly into a story, however, unless maybe the gelatin is made to hold some mysterious material with more dire effects... SF is not usually about the use of technology, but its creative misuse.

Progress is a bunch of nanobots transforming things at a level below the visible.

Hey!  Where are my nanobots? I figured we'd all be gray goo by now....

Is "psychology" to blame for poor electric car sales?

This post on Wonkblog tries to puzzle out why people aren't buying electric cars. It seems that people are nervous about an expensive (around $40K for many models) vehicle that will only go 65 miles before needing a lengthy recharge.  Most Americans drive less than 40 miles a day, advocates say. What's the problem?

For about a century we've had vehicles that go hundreds of miles on a tank and can be refueled in a minute or two pretty much anywhere.  And they cost $40K only if we really really want to show off.  The article implies that we have an irrational attachment to the notion we can go out of our driveway and drive across the country if we want to.

Well, it is great that we can do that if we want to. Because if we can do that, we know we can do all sorts of other things without a second thought. We can make an unexpected trip to visit a client in another city, or go to the seashore to walk on the beach, or help a friend move, or spend a day or two not worrying about whether the battery is charged.  Even if we were upgrading from horses, that range restriction might give us pause.

The plain fact is that carbon compounds store a lot of energy in a compact and easily transportable form, a form that is easily converted into motion, heat, or whatever else you need. Nothing else comes close. So carbon compounds are going to make us go for a long time to come, unless someone puts electric strips down the middle of highway lanes, turning our vehicles into big slot cars. The expedient of having a backup internal combustion engine, as in the Chevy Volt, takes care of the range problem, but is what makes that car so expensive--it's a car that also has an electric motor in it. 

I'm an environmentally concerned blue-stater who bikes almost everywhere. I've never even liked driving. I still think electric cars are dumb. Like most of our so-called "alternative" energy devices (there's actually not much "alternative" about the coal-plant-generated electricity used to charge these cars) they, like wind or solar, are actually devices for generating tax credits and a sense of virtue, not practical solutions to real world problems.

Just to be clear, I'm reacting more against the clueless rah rah enthusiasm such gadgets encourage than against the idea that we should investigate alternatives to carbon-based transportation and power generation.

But few people who actually need to get anywhere are going to buy the current models. So don't blame the Stonecutters.

Do we deserve our doom?

How will future descendants view us?  I think most of us are honest, hard-working, decent folks. But, across the entire developed world, we have managed to get ourselves into a horrendous mess. A freaking dumb mess, because we already have as much stuff as anyone could possibly ever use.

And what are we doing to get ourselves out of it?

The childishly named Super Committee has come back out of their sekrit clubhouse with...nothing. Of course, they swore they would shoot their favorite dogs if they did not solve our problems. So now, having sworn this, they will, of course, return home, pour a last bowl of Iams, scratch  Maggie behind the ears and then put a hollowpoint through her skull. That will make them sorry they couldn't figure out the incredibly hard problem of how to reduce the world's largest military budget, out-of-control entitlements, or comical healthcare costs.

But look how useful that dang dog is, they will say. Nothing is be gained now by destroying such a fine animal now, is there? Only a fool would think of reducing value in this way.

Southern tier Europeans are rioting because the magic beans that were going to get them to the giant's hideout to steal talking harps and treasure have turned out to be...beans.  Those take a long time to grow, and then all you have are more beans. "But the guy said..." The Germans who kept funding the Mercedes their layabout brother-in-law was building out in the garage have finally opened the door only to find a couple of tires and lots of empty tall boys, and they are mad. How could anyone have hoodwinked them so cleverly?

Will my descendants see me as a ludicrous fool for even living in this time? Because I can see how things can easily tip into a real disaster.  And it's not going to be an accident, like getting hit by an asteroid or something. It's because that stack of wedding china we built to get to the bourbon we think Dad hid in that top cabinet is really starting to wiggle and we have no idea of how to get down. It's because we're morons.

My grandchildren will come to visit me wherever my irritated offspring have warehoused me and say "Grandpa, why were you all such morons?" And all I'll be able to say is "Just you wait, you wretched sprat. Just you wait. If you think you're smarter it's because you haven't managed to build your stack high enough. Isn't there a gravy boat in the sideboard you haven't tried to balance on the top yet? The problem with your generation is that you just lack enterprise."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go off and work on my hollow laugh. I can see that it will really come in handy.

I'm a fan of RoboKopter

I've been wondering why news agencies aren't sending unmanned drones with cameras and microphones into areas too dangerous for ground reporters, just to give an idea of what's going on. Prices have been dropping, while capabilities continue to increase.

One Polish activist used such a device, RoboKopter, to film police at recent riots in Warsaw that I have to admit I had heard nothing about (HT: Kottke)

This page has two of the best. Here is a video of the device itself, flying around a stadium (no need to watch the whole thing).

Kottke has the fascinating observation that the different camera views in Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL to devise actual ways of delivering those kinds of views, since their audience was growing the expect them. He anticipates the same happening for news footage, as cinema quality and news quality merge.

The quality of the RoboKopter video is fantastic. For a long time, movies have used grainy, washed-out, blueish imagery to signify the "authenticity" of surveillance camera footage, and vomitcam jerkiness to do the same for handheld camperas.  What signifier will you use when all video images, no matter what their source, are of smooth brightly colored RoboKopter quality?

I'm still not seeing as many of these things as I would expect. Maybe the change will come quickly, and within a year or two they will be omnipresent. That's the way it happens.